Why travelling with children can really be quite wonderful

When I met my husband, we were embarking on an overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town. He’d been backpacking through Europe, I’d been living in Spain. Over the next eight years or so, we visited 25 countries together across four continents. It was only the sheer beauty, vibrancy and diversity of Cape Town that eventually soothed our itchy feet.

I’m not telling you this to brag or attempt to incite jealousy but to show how travel has always been a major part of our life together. We are engaged in a perpetual competition to see who’s been to the most countries (it’s him, but I will catch up), our shelves are full of guidebooks, our walls full of maps. So when we had a baby back in 2013, you can imagine what people said. “Oh, that’ll be the end of your travels.” “Your life is going to change!” “You won’t be able to travel around once the little one arrives.”

Who needs a kids’ playground when you have a sunset shadow to play with?

Of course, they were right about one thing – our lives changed. Of course they did – anyone who thinks they can bring a small human onto the planet and not change pretty much everything about their lives is probably a fool. But it’s often insinuated that when it comes to kids, the change will be a negative one. I don’t want to sugar coat things – travelling with babies or toddlers is tough and you may well have to rethink the way you travel. Gone are the 24-hour train rides and the days spent walking 20,000 steps around a city; here instead are plans that revolve around bottle-warming or nap times or being back at the accommodation in time to start the bedtime routine. But there really is something quite magnificent about travelling with young children, particularly when they reach the chatty years.

Kai – he was named for the city in which we met – is now four, and he is a pretty cool travel companion. Sure, stuff goes wrong. Sometimes you spend weeks carefully planning an itinerary tailored just for him and then all he wants to do is stay in what he calls the “holiday house”. There are tantrums to deal with, colossal piles of luggage to bring, road trips are certainly not as much fun as they used to be and more often than not, we all end up going to bed at 8pm.

No TV, no wifi, no central heating, but still the best holiday house ever

But here’s the pay-off: children are so innocent, so unjaded that everything is wondrous. As grown-ups we rock up at destinations with preconceived ideas of how our trip will pan out. Our bucket-list destinations had better be perfect, our game-viewing experiences had better be David Attenborough-worthy and we want our perfectly-planned holiday to run, well, perfectly. We can learn a lot from travelling with little kids – they can help get back to the basics of travel and help us to appreciate not just the world wonders but everything we find along the way.

We just got back from a short road trip through the Northern Cape. Admittedly it was shorter than planned (after realising just how cold Namaqualand is in winter, I vetoed the camping section and we came home early). There were no big ticket stops on our list and virtually nothing you’d label a child-friendly attraction, but Kai embraced it all as though we were at Disney World. “This holiday house is my favourite!” he shouted as we arrived at the 19th-century corbelled house just outside Carnvarvon. “I’m going to stay here forever!” he told me excitedly, as I cursed the temperature and my decision to visit in winter. “I love Carnarvon so much!” he yelped as we briefly stopped in the tiny town to check out a collection of antique beer cans (yes, really). It’s a statement I can only imagine doesn’t get uttered too often. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with Carnarvon, but it’s not exactly Paris. It’s not even Springbok.

Smelling the flowers – all 12 of them – at the Hantam National Botanical Garden outside Nieuwoudtville

One of our main goals on the trip was to finally witness the spring flowers after living in South Africa for seven years. But there was not a lot blooming in Namaqualand thanks to the drought. I was pretty disappointed and regretted my choice to tell Kai that we were going to see lots of flowers. But then I had an awakening of how travelling with children really can be something special. My momentary disappointment in the lack of floral carpets was quickly washing away by Kai’s boundless enthusiasm for every petal he spotted. “Mummy, I found a yellow one!” he’d shout, gleefully, as he ran through the barren Hantam National Botanical Garden on the most exciting flower hunt he could ever imagine.

It was on this trip that I finally decided to start a family travel blog. It’s something I’ve been thinking about, on-and-off, ever since that first ultrasound. I hope you’ll join us as we try to see South Africa – and the rest of the world – in that wide-eyed way that every child does.